Bird Cloud, by Annie Proulx

4.99 USD

Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx’s piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there.

“Bird
Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands
and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North
Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a
bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles,
golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers,
kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the
land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted
to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her
character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Bird Cloud
is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar
panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on
kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and
archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and
Shoshone Indians—and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century
Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a
writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here
turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a
house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and
long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and
maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her
time.